The Three Musketeers Flops, Milla Jovovich is NOT Happy

If approached with the right mindset, Paul W.S. Anderson’s take on Alexandre Dumas’ “The Three Musketeers” can be a fun action-adventure, swashbuckling type of film. It’s certainly goofy enough, with some of the most howl-inducing lines of dialogue I’ve heard in a big-budget Hollywood studio film in decades. At times, I was convinced the movie was some kind of bad Saturday Night Live skit. Still, despite its lack of ambitions, it was certainly entertaining, and I’m a bit shocked the film has flopped so badly at the box office.

In its first week, the movie opened in fourth place with a below average $8.8 million. With an estimated production budget of around $75 million, the film has already earned $64 in overseas box office, but even that is somewhat low for a Hollywood-made action movie, which usually translates well in places where English is not necessary to enjoy the ‘splosions. Then again, a lot of the film’s hidden gems can be glean from the English dialogue, so the language barrier might have gotten in the way.

So whose fault is it? Star Milla Jovovich (who plays Milady in the movie, and is also married to its director Paul W.S. Anderson, so yes, she has a LOT invested in the movie) puts the blame squarely on the movie’s distributor Summit Entertainment. The actress lashed out via her Twitter account with a series of tweets over the weekend making her point:

She’s not far off. I didn’t really see a whole lot of “Three Musketeers” commercials leading up to the Friday release of the film. It almost seems as if Summit just decided to cut bait at the last minute after realizing a) there was no appetite for their movie and b) that “Paranormal Activity 3″ was going to be a monster, so why bother? It’ll be interesting to see how Summit responds to Jovovich’s tweets, if they do at all.

It’ll also be interesting to see how Warner Bros. reacts, since they were also working on their own version of the “Three Musketeers” last we checked…